The world turns. In Indonesia, the principal of a Muslim boarding
school in Tangerang who is accused of impregnating a 15-year-old
student says the DNA test will prove that a malevolent genie is the
real father.

In New Zealand, a German tourist, Herr Hans Kurt Kubus, has been
jailed for attempting to board a plane at Christchurch with 44 live
lizards in his underpants.

In Britain, a research team at King's College, London, has declared that the female "G-spot" does not, in fact, exist.

In France a group of top gynecologists led by Monsieur Sylvain
Mimoun has dismissed the findings, and said what do you expect if you
ask a group of Englishmen to try to find a woman's erogenous zone.

But, in America, Barack Obama is talking.

Talking, talking, talking. He talked for 90 minutes at the State of
the Union. No matter how many geckos you shoveled down your briefs, you
still lost all feeling in your legs. And still he talked. If you had an
erogenous zone before he started, by the end it was undetectable even
to Frenchmen. But on he talked. As respected poverty advocate Sen. John Edwards commented, "After the first hour, even my malevolent genie was back in the bottle."

Like any gifted orator, the president knows how to vary the talk
with a little light and shade. Sometimes he hectors, sometimes he
whines, sometimes he demands. He hectored the Supreme Court. He whined
about all the problems he inherited. He demanded Congress put
a jobs bill on his desk. Or was it a desk job on his bill? No matter.
He does Nixon impressions, too: "We do not quit," he said.

Boy, you can say that again!

So he did: "We don't quit. I don't quit," he said. Throughout the chamber, Democrats were quitting. "I quit," says Rep. Marion Berry of Arkansas, declining to run this November. "I quit," says Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, doing likewise. "I quit," says Bo Biden of Delaware, son of Vice President Joe Biden, choosing not to succeed to his father's seat in America's House of Lords.

But not Barack Obama: "I don't quit." So on he went. As my colleague Rich Lowry put
it after the Massachusetts vote, the public thinks Obama doesn't get
it, and Obama thinks the public doesn't get it. And as he's got the
microphone he's gonna keep talking at you until you do get it.

The ever tinnier, more perfunctory sophomoric uplift at the start
and finish can't conceal the hope-killing, jobs-slaying, soul-sapping
message in between, which is perfectly consistent, and has been for two
years. As President Obama sees it, whatever the problem – from health
care to education, banking to the environment – the solution is more
Washington.

Simply as a matter of internal logic, this is somewhat perplexing. After all, when he isn't blaming George W. Bush,
Obama blames "Washington" – a Washington mired in "partisanship" and
"pettiness" and "the same tired battles" and "Washington gimmicks" that
do nothing but ensure that our "problems have grown worse." Washington,
Obama tells us, is "unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems."

So let's have more Washington! In our schools, in our hospitals, in our cars, in everything!

Which raises the question: Does even Obama listen to Obama's speeches?

The public does – at least to this extent: They understand that,
when he's attacking the tired old Washington games, he's just playing
the tired old Washington games. But, when he's proposing the tired old
Washington solutions, he means it; that's the real Obama, the only
Obama on offer. And everything the president proposes means more debt,
which at the level this guy's spending means, at some point down the
road, either higher taxes or total societal collapse.

Functioning societies depend on agreed rules. If you want to open a
business, you do it in Singapore or Ireland, because the rules are
known to all parties. You don't go to Sudan or Zimbabwe, where the
rules are whatever the state's whims happen to be that morning.

That's why Obama is such a job-killer. Why would a small business
take on a new employee? The president's proposing a soak-the-banks tax
that could impact your access to credit. The House has passed a
cap-and-trade bill that could impose potentially unlimited regulatory
costs. The Senate is
in favor of "health" "care" "reform" that will allow the IRS to seize
your assets if you and your employees' health arrangements do not meet
the approval of the federal government. Some of these things will pass
into law, some of them won't. But all of them send a consistent,
cumulative message: that there are no rules, that they're being made up
as they go along – and that some of them might even be retroactive, as
happened this week with Oregon's new corporate tax.

In such an environment, would you hire anyone? Or would you hunker
down and sit things out? Obama can bury it in half a ton of leaden
telepromptered sludge but the world has got the message: More
Washington, more microregulation of every aspect of your life, more
multi-trillion-dollar spending, and no agreed rules in a game ever more
rigged against you.

Obama and the Democrats have decided, in the current cliché, to
"double down." That hardly does justice to what the president's doing.
In effect, he's told embattled congressmen and senators to strap on the
old suicide-bomber belt and self-detonate for the team this November.

That's a lot of virgins to pass out, but, with this administration,
budget restraints aren't exactly a problem: Untold pleasures will await
every sacrificial incumbent in paradise, or at any rate the coming
liberal utopia.

What's the end game here? President Obama gave it away in his
student-loan "reform" proposals: If you choose to go into "public
service," any college-loan debts will be forgiven after 10 years.

Because "public service" is more noble than the selfish,
money-grubbing private sector. C'mon, everybody knows that. So we need
to encourage more people to go into "public service."

Why?

In the past 60 years, the size of America's state and local
workforce has increased five times faster than the general population.
But the president says it's still not enough: We have to incentivize
even further the diversion of our human capital into the government
machine.

Like most lifelong politicians, Barack Obama has never created,
manufactured or marketed any product other than himself. So, quite
reasonably, he sees government dependency as the natural order of
things.

And in his college-loan plan he's explicitly telling you: If you
start a business, invent something, provide a service, you're a schmuck
and a loser. In the America he's building, you'll be working 24/7 till
you drop dead to fund an ever-swollen bureaucracy that takes six weeks
off a year and retires at 53 on a pension you could never dream of.
Obama's proposals are bold only insofar as few men would offer such a
transparent guarantee of disaster: It's the audacity of hopelessness.

In Massachusetts, enough voters got the message. And the more
speeches this one-note politician inflicts on the nation the louder
they'll hear it.

New boss, old boss, blah, blah, blah. Once again, we see that asking the wrong questions means they don't have to worry about the answers. Even some one who claims (and appears) to "get it", doesn't. He, like most everyone else, already works for the government; in the "private sector" of the government.

He became "federal personnel" the moment he "applied" for government retirement (and any other) benefits.

Comment by Lola Flores

Entered on: 2/1/2010 8:39:42 AM

Sure, if you wanna believe that. However, some of us happen to think that the new boss is the same as the old boss but, I can understand why you partisan types can't accept that reality